Kate Bolick Quote

Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing’s slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this epicist of the female experience, as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we’re born into; all of us, male and female, are part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself.

Kate Bolick

Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing’s slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this epicist of the female experience, as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we’re born into; all of us, male and female, are part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself.

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About Kate Bolick

Kate Bolick (born 1972) is the author of New York Times bestseller Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own. She is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic, and host of "Touchstones at The Mount," an annual literary interview series at Edith Wharton’s country estate in the Berkshires.
Bolick attended Colby College and New York University.